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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

• Search Results

The best essay collections to read now

From advice on friendship and understanding modern life to getting a grasp on coronavirus, these books offer insight on life. 

What better way to get into the work of a writer than through a collection of their essays? 

These seven collections, from novelists and critics alike, address a myriad of subjects from friendship to how colleges are dealing with sexual assaults on campus to race and racism. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (2019)

As a staff writer at The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino has explored everything from a rise in youth vaping to the ongoing cultural reckoning about sexual assault. Her first book Trick Mirror takes some of those pieces for The New Yorker as well as new work to form what is one of the sharpest collections of cultural criticism today.

Using herself and her own coming of age as a lens for many of the essays, Tolentino turns her pen and her eye to everything from her generation’s obsession with extravagant weddings to how college campuses deal with sexual assault.

If you’re looking for an insight into millennial life, then Trick Mirror should be on your to-read list.

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker (1983)

Sometimes essays collected from a sprawling period of a successful writer’s life can feel like a hasty addition to a bibliography; a smash-and-grab of notebook flotsam. Not so In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , from which one can truly understand the sheer range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s range of study and activism. From Walker’s first published piece of non-fiction (for which she won a prize, and spent her winnings on cut peonies) to more elegiac pieces about her heritage, Walker’s thoughts on feminism (which she terms “womanism”) and the Civil Rights Movement remain grippingly pertinent 50 years on.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

That David Sedaris’s ascent to literary stardom happened later in his life – his breakthrough collection of humour essays was released when he was 44 – suited the author’s writing style perfectly. Me Talk Pretty One Day is both a painfully funny account of his childhood and an enduring snapshot of mid-forties malaise. First story ‘Go Carolina’, about his attempt to transcend a childhood lisp, is told from a perfect distance and with all the worldliness necessary to milk every drop of tragic, cringeworthy humour from his childhood. It never falters from there: by the book’s second half, in which Sedaris is living in France, he’s firmly established his niche, writing about the ways that even snobs experience utter humiliation ­– and Me Talk Pretty One Day is all the more human for it. 

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• BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

The Best Essay Collections to Add to Your TBR List

Discover big ideas in small doses.

Anyone who has read very much of it knows that some of the best prose around is happening in nonfiction. From personal essays to political ones, cultural criticism to travelogues, these 10 books represent some of the best essay writing of the last century, spanning continents and languages, tackling subjects that range from political unrest to pulp fiction—and everything in-between. 

So, if you’re ready to expand your mind and change your outlook, add these essay collections to your TBR list today!

A Day in the Life of Roger Angell

By Roger Angell

While you may not recognize Roger Angell’s name, you probably know who he is. The stepson of legendary author E. B. White, Angell has worked for the New Yorker in various capacities for decades, including as a frequent contributing writer. 

He has written about all sorts of subjects, especially baseball, and this unique collection pulls together a variety of his best-loved pieces, including his famous Christmas poems, a variety of parodies, and a “tense correspondence over a short fiction contest that pays only in baked goods.”

Related: "Your Horoscope," by Roger Angell

My Seditious Heart

By Arundhati Roy

A New York Times  bestseller and Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy is many things, and in My Seditious Heart  she proves that among those is an “electrifying political essayist” ( Booklist ). 

Collecting essays from two decades of her life, this “lucid and probing” ( Time Magazine ) book presents a lifetime of battling for social and political justice and human rights, from American capitalism to the Hindu caste system and beyond. “The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering,” writes The New York Times Book Review . “Her pointed indictment is devastating.”

Want more great books? Sign up for the Early Bird Books newsletter and get the best daily ebook deals delivered straight to your inbox.

Men Explain Things to Me

By Rebecca Solnit

In these “personal but unsentimental essays” ( The New York Times ), National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Rebecca Solnit provides the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” ( The Stranger ). 

From the title essay, which explores why men talk over women and what the ultimate cost of that is, to essays about Virginia Woolf and marriage equality, Solnit’s unsparing prose has been called “ essential feminist reading ” by The New Republic – and simply “essential” by Marketplace .

Collection of Sand

By Italo Calvino

Newly translated into English for the first time by Martin McLaughlin, this “brilliant collection of essays” and travelogues, the last piece of new writing published by the legendary Italo Calvino before his death, “may change the way you see the world around you” ( The Guardian ). 

From antique maps to Japanese gardens, Calvino takes us on a tour of the world, but also of his own mind, in the process heightening our appreciation of the visual world around us. 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

By Joan Didion

In her first work of nonfiction, one of America’s most “dazzling” prose stylists ( The New York Times ) also establishes herself as a singular voice on American culture, painting a vivid portrait of a nation in the midst of tumultuous change. 

First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic , hailed as “a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country” by the New York Times Book Review . No wonder Time Magazine chose it as one of the 100 best and most influential nonfiction books to date.

Related: Joan Didion: Her Books, Life and Legacy

Essays After Eighty

By Donald Hall

A former Poet Laureate of the United States, Donald Hall has “wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge” in his waning years, according to The Wall Street Journal . This collection of essays written, as the title implies, after he turned 80, sees Hall reflecting on his life, on his career, on writing itself, and on the view out his window. 

“Alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny ” ( The New York Times ), these essays show that Hall has never lost his deft touch, nor his passion for life and all of its mysteries, whimsies, and wonders.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

By Angela Y. Davis

Author of such classic works as Women, Race, and  Class, Angela Y. Davis made a name for herself as an activist and scholar with a penetrating insight into social issues. 

In this new collection of essays, she tackles some of the most pressing issues that affect our present moment , from the Black Lives Matter movement to Palestine and beyond, calling upon us all to imagine a better world – and do the important work required to make it possible.

Illuminations

By Walter Benjamin

A German cultural critic who has been called one of most original thinkers of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin fled Germany in 1932, as the Nazi party rose to power, and died in exile before the end of the second World War. 

Hannah Arendt, herself one of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, hand-assembled this collection of some of Benjamin’s most famous and most important essays, including his legendary “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to form this unforgettable book from a unique mind.

Tell Me How It Ends

By Valeria Luiselli

An American Book Award Winner and a finalist for both the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this “essay in forty questions” is a “moving, intimate” account of serving as a translator for undocumented children facing deportation ( The New York Times Book Review ). 

As a volunteer worker, Luiselli translated these forty questions from a court form to ask undocumented children who were under threat of deportation. By structuring her writing around them, she helps to put a vitally human face on children who are thrust into an often-uncaring system in this book that is, “Worth of inclusion in a great American (and international) canon of writing about migration” ( Texas Observer ).

Maps and Legends

By Michael Chabon

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay “makes an inviting case for bridging the gap between popular and literary writing” ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) in this appreciation of everything from pulp fiction to comic books, horror to westerns. 

By writing about the stories that move him, speak to him, and inspired him to write, Chabon also talks about his own identity as an author, and what storytelling means to all of us, whether he’s writing about Superman or Sherlock Holmes.

Related: 12 Michael Chabon Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down

Keep Reading: 10 Essential Essay-Length Memoirs You Can Read Online for Free

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100 Best Essays Books of All Time

We've researched and ranked the best essays books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more

Men Explain Things to Me

Rebecca Solnit | 5.00

Chelsea Handler Goes deep with statistics, personal stories, and others’ accounts of how brutal this world can be for women, the history of how we've been treated, and what it will take to change the conversation: MEN. We need them to be as outraged as we are and join our fight. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris | 4.96

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.94

Barack Obama The president also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015: All That Is, James Salter The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (Source)

Jack Dorsey Q: What are the books that had a major influence on you? Or simply the ones you like the most. : Tao te Ching, score takes care of itself, between the world and me, the four agreements, the old man and the sea...I love reading! (Source)

Doug McMillon Here are some of my favorite reads from 2017. Lots of friends and colleagues send me book suggestions and it's impossible to squeeze them all in. I continue to be super curious about how digital and tech are enabling people to transform our lives but I try to read a good mix of books that apply to a variety of areas and stretch my thinking more broadly. (Source)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion | 4.94

Peter Hessler I like Didion for her writing style and her control over her material, but also for the way in which she captures a historical moment. (Source)

Liz Lambert I love [this book] so much. (Source)

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.92

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay | 4.88

Irina Nica It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite because, as time goes by and I grow older, my reading list becomes more “mature” and I find myself interested in new things. I probably have a personal favorite book for each stage of my life. Right now I’m absolutely blown away by everything Roxane Gay wrote, especially Bad Feminist. (Source)

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino | 4.86

Lydia Polgreen This book is amazing and you should read it. https://t.co/pcbmYUR4QP (Source)

Maryanne Hobbs ⁦@jiatolentino⁩ hello Jia :) finding your perspectives in the new book fascinating and so resonant.. thank you 🌹 m/a..x https://t.co/BoNzB1BuDf (Source)

Yashar Ali . @jiatolentino’s fabulous book is one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2019 https://t.co/QHzZsHl2rF (Source)

Consider the Lobster

And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace | 4.85

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf | 4.75

Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim

David Sedaris | 4.73

Adam Kay @penceyprepmemes How about David Sedaris, for starters - "Dress your family in corduroy and denim" is an amazing book. (Source)

Don't have time to read the top Essays books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

• Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
• Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
• Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin | 4.69

Barack Obama Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein Sapiens: A Brief History of... (Source)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris | 4.67

David Sedaris | 4.63

David Blaine It’s hilarious. (Source)

The White Album

Joan Didion | 4.62

Dan Richards I feel Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work. (Source)

Steven Amsterdam With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian. (Source)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace | 4.61

Tressie McMillan Cottom | 4.60

Melissa Moore The best book I read this year was Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I read it twice and both times found it challenging and revelatory. (Source)

David Sedaris and Hachette Audi | 4.60

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke | 4.60

Bianca Belair For #BHM  I will be sharing some of my favorite books by Black Authors 26th Book: Sister Outsider By: Audre Lorde My first time reading anything by Audre Lorde. I am now really looking forward to reading more of her poems/writings. What she writes is important & timeless. https://t.co/dUDMcaAAbx (Source)

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

David Sedaris | 4.58

Austin Kleon I read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks. (Source)

Notes from a Loud Woman

Lindy West | 4.56

Matt Mcgorry "Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman" by Lindy West @TheLindyWest # Lovvvvveeedddd, loved, loved, loved this book!!!  West is a truly remarkable writer and her stories are beautifully poignant while dosed with her… https://t.co/nzJtXtOGTn (Source)

Shannon Coulter @JennLHaglund @tomi_adeyemi I love that feeling! Just finished the audiobook version of Shrill by Lindy West after _years_ of meaning to read it and that's the exact feeling it gave me. Give me your book recommendations! (Source)

The Collected Schizophrenias

Esmé Weijun Wang | 4.52

Tiny Beautiful Things

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Cheryl Strayed | 4.49

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. Cheryl Strayed, also the author of Wild, was the anonymous columnist behind the online column, Dear Sugar and boy, are we better off for it. This is not a random smattering of advice. This book contains some of the most cogent insights on life, pain, loss, love, success, youth that I... (Source)

James Altucher Cheryl had an advice column called “Dear Sugar”. I was reading the column long before Oprah recommended “Wild” by Cheryl and then Wild became a movie and “Tiny Beautiful Things” (the collection of her advice column) became a book. She is so wise and compassionate. A modern saint. I used to do Q&A sessions on Twitter. I’d read her book beforehand to get inspiration about what true advice is. (Source)

We Were Eight Years in Power

An American Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.47

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

Albert Camu | 4.47

David Heinemeier Hansson Camus’ philosophical exposition of absurdity, suicide in the face of meaninglessness, and other cherry topics that continue on from his fictional work in novels like The Stranger. It’s surprisingly readable, unlike many other mid 20th century philosophers, yet no less deep or pointy. It’s a great follow-up, as an original text, to that book The Age of Absurdity, I recommended last year. Still... (Source)

Kenan Malik The Myth of Sisyphus is a small work, but Camus’s meditation on faith and fate has personally been hugely important in developing my ideas. Writing in the embers of World War II, Camus confronts in The Myth of Sisyphus both the tragedy of recent history and what he sees as the absurdity of the human condition. There is, he observes, a chasm between the human need for meaning and what he calls... (Source)

The Penguin Essays Of George Orwell

George Orwell, Bernard Crick | 4.46

Peter Kellner George Orwell was not only an extraordinary writer but he also hated any form of cant. Some of his most widely read works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are an assault on the nastier, narrow-minded, dictatorial tendencies of the left, although Orwell was himself on the left. (Source)

The Opposite of Loneliness

Essays and Stories

Marina Keegan, Anne Fadiman | 4.46

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.45

The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.45

Kevin Rose Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. (Source)

Seth Godin Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. (Source)

Andy Stern I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then... (Source)

Selected Essays

Mary Oliver | 4.44

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Samantha Irby | 4.44

Complete Essays

Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton | 4.42

Ryan Holiday There is plenty to study and see simply by looking inwards — maybe even an alarming amount. (Source)

Alain de Botton I’ve given quite a lot of copies of [this book] to people down the years. (Source)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling | 4.42

Angela Kinsey .@mindykaling I am rereading your book and cracking up. I appreciate your chapter on The Office so much more now. But all of it is fantastic. Thanks for starting my day with laughter. You know I loves ya. ❤️ https://t.co/EB99xnyt0p (Source)

Yashar Ali Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from @mindykaling's book (even though I'm an early riser): “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” https://t.co/pS56bmyYjS (Source)

Not That Bad

Dispatches from Rape Culture

Roxane Gay, Brandon Taylor, et al | 4.40

Henry David Thoreau | 4.40

Laura Dassow Walls The book that we love as Walden began in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond. (Source)

Roman Krznaric In 1845 the American naturalist went out to live in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. (Source)

John Kaag There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. (Source)

Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman | 4.40

I Feel Bad About My Neck

And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron | 4.39

Holidays on Ice

David Sedaris | 4.37

An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine | 4.36

Cheryl Strayed A really important book for us to be reading right now. (Source)

Jeremy Noel-Tod Obviously, it’s been admired and acclaimed, but I do feel the general reception of it has underplayed its artfulness. Its technical subtlety and overall arrangement has been neglected, because it has been classified as a kind of documentary work. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens | 4.36

Le Grove @billysubway Hitchens book under your arm. I’m reading Arguably. When he’s at his best, he is a savage. Unbelievable prose. (Source)

Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin | 4.35

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks | 4.34

Suzanne O'Sullivan I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. (Source)

Tanya Byron This is a seminal book that anyone who wants to work in mental health should read. It is a charming and gentle and also an honest exposé of what can happen to us when our mental health is compromised for whatever reason. (Source)

Bradley Voytek I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But that could happen to any of us. (Source)

The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison | 4.33

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Ann Patchett | 4.31

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman | 4.30

Karen Pfaff Manganillo Never have I read a book that I said “this is so perfect, amazing, hilarious, he’s thinking what I’m thinking (in a much more thought out and cool way)”. (Source)

Bird By Bird

Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott | 4.29

Susan Cain I love [this book]. Such a good book. (Source)

Timothy Ferriss Bird by Bird is one of my absolute favorite books, and I gift it to everybody, which I should probably also give to startup founders, quite frankly. A lot of the lessons are the same. But you can get to your destination, even though you can only see 20 feet in front of you. (Source)

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. [...] Anne Lamott’s book is ostensibly about the art of writing, but really it too is about life and how to tackle the problems, temptations and opportunities life throws at us. Both will make you think and both made me a better person this year. (Source)

Zadie Smith | 4.29

Barack Obama As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.28

Sam Freedman @mrianleslie (Also I agree What the Dog Saw is his best book). (Source)

The Witches Are Coming

Lindy West | 4.27

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Susan Sontag | 4.25

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Alexander Chee | 4.25

Eula Biss Alex Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life. (Source)

Changing My Mind

Occasional Essays

Zadie Smith | 4.25

Barrel Fever

David Sedaris | 4.24

Chelsea Handler [The author] is fucking hilarious and there's nothing I prefer to do more than laugh. If this book doesn't make you laugh, I'll refund you the money. (Source)

The Fire This Time

A New Generation Speaks About Race

Jesmyn Ward | 4.24

Why Not Me?

Mindy Kaling | 4.24

The View from the Cheap Seats

Selected Nonfiction

Neil Gaiman | 4.24

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley | 4.24

The Intelligent Investor

The Classic Text on Value Investing

Benjamin Graham | 4.23

Warren Buffett To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline. (Source)

Kevin Rose The foundation for investing. A lot of people have used this as their guide to getting into investment, basic strategies. Actually Warren Buffett cites this as the book that got him into investing and he says that principles he learned here helped him to become a great investor. Highly recommend this book. It’s a great way understand what’s going on and how to evaluate different companies out... (Source)

John Kay The idea is that you look at the underlying value of the company’s activities instead of relying on market gossip. (Source)

Tell Me How It Ends

An Essay in Forty Questions

Valeria Luiselli | 4.23

Tina Fey | 4.22

Sheryl Sandberg I absolutely loved Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and didn't want it to end. It's hilarious as well as important. Not only was I laughing on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy. [...] It is so, so good. As a young girl, I was labeled bossy, too, so as a former - O.K., current - bossypants, I am grateful to Tina for being outspoken, unapologetic and hysterically... (Source)

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Hanif Abdurraqib, Dr. Eve L. Ewing | 4.22

Saadia Muzaffar Man, this is such an amazing book of essays. Meditations on music and musicians and their moments and meaning-making. @NifMuhammad's mindworks are a gift. Go find it. (thank you @asad_ch!) https://t.co/htSueYYBUT (Source)

This Is Water

Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

David Foster Wallace | 4.21

John Jeremiah Sullivan | 4.21

Greil Marcus This is a new book by a writer in his mid-thirties, about all kinds of things. A lot of it is about the South, some of it is autobiographical, there is a long and quite wonderful piece about going to a Christian music camp. (Source)

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit | 4.20

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Sarah Vowell, Katherine Streeter | 4.20

Essays of E.B. White

E. B. White | 4.19

Adam Gopnik White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and... (Source)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit | 4.19

A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut | 4.18

No Time to Spare

Thinking About What Matters

Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler | 4.17

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard | 4.16

Laura Dassow Walls She’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life. (Source)

Sara Maitland This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. (Source)

Maggie Nelson | 4.14

Furiously Happy

A Funny Book About Horrible Things

Jenny Lawson | 4.13

Women & Power

A Manifesto

Mary Beard | 4.13

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder | 4.12

George Saunders Please read this book. So smart, so timely. (Source)

Tom Holland "There isn’t a page of this magnificent book that does not contain some fascinating detail and the narrative is held together with a novelist’s eye for character and theme." #Dominion https://t.co/FESSNxVDLC (Source)

Maya Wiley Prof. Tim Snyder, author of “In Tyranny” reminded us in that important little book that we must protect our institutions. #DOJ is one of our most important in gov’t for the rule of law. This is our collective house & #Barr should be evicted. https://t.co/PPxM9IMQUm (Source)

Small Wonder

Barbara Kingsolver | 4.11

The Source of Self-Regard

Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Toni Morrison | 4.11

Hyperbole and a Half

Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Allie Brosh | 4.11

Bill Gates While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach -- looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian. (Source)

Samantha Irby | 4.10

Both Flesh and Not

David Foster Wallace | 4.10

David Papineau People can learn to do amazing things with their bodies, and people start honing and developing these skills as an end in itself, a very natural thing for humans to do. (Source)

So Sad Today

Personal Essays

Melissa Broder | 4.10

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Rebecca Solnit | 4.09

Prem Panicker @sanjayen This is from an essay Solnit wrote to introduce the updated version of her book Hope In The Dark. Anything Solnit is brilliant; at times like these, she is the North Star. (Source)

The Faraway Nearby

How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen | 4.08

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag | 4.08

The Essays of Warren Buffett

Lessons for Corporate America, Fifth Edition

Lawrence A. Cunningham and Warren E. Buffett | 4.08

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

Scaachi Koul | 4.07

Amy Poehler | 4.06

The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois | 4.05

Barack Obama According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black... (Source)

In Praise of Shadows

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki | 4.05

Kyle Chayka Tanizaki is mourning what has been paved over, which is the old Japanese aesthetic of darkness, of softness, of appreciating the imperfect—rather than the cold, glossy surfaces of industrialized modernity that the West had brought to Japan at that moment. For me, that’s really valuable, because it does preserve a different way of looking at the world. (Source)

Ways of Seeing

John Berger | 4.04

Robert Jones He’s a Marxist and says that the role of publicity or branding is to make people marginally dissatisfied with their current way of life. (Source)

David McCammon Ways of Seeing goes beyond photography and will continue to develop your language around images. (Source)

John Harrison (Eton College) You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. (Source)

Tackling the Texas Essays

Efficient Preparation for the Texas Bar Exam

Catherine Martin Christopher | 4.04

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay | 4.04

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis | 4.04

Anoop Anthony "Mere Christianity" is first and foremost a rational book — it is in many ways the opposite of a traditional religious tome. Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking. The book reveals that experiencing God doesn't have to be a mystical exercise; God can be a concrete and logical conclusion. Lewis was... (Source)

I Remember Nothing

and Other Reflections

Nora Ephron | 4.04

On Photography

Susan Sontag | 4.03

Susan Bordo Sontag was the first to make the claim, which at the time was very controversial, that photography is misleading and seductive because it looks like reality but is in fact highly selective. (Source)

Notes from No Man's Land

American Essays

Eula Biss | 4.03

The Doors of Perception

Heaven and Hell (Thinking Classics)

Aldous Huxley, Robbie McCallum | 4.03

Michelle Rodriguez Aldous Huxley on Technodictators https://t.co/RDyX70lnZz via @YouTube ‘Doors of Perception’ is a great book entry level to hallucinogenics (Source)

Auston Bunsen I also really loved “The doors of perception” by Aldous Huxley. (Source)

Dr. Andrew Weil Came first [in terms of my interests]. (Source)

The Geek Feminist Revolution

Kameron Hurley | 4.02

Wow, No Thank You.

Samantha Irby | 4.01

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift | 4.01

At Large and at Small

Familiar Essays

Anne Fadiman | 4.00

• Online Course

10 Best Books on Essay Writing (You Should Read Today)

You can improve your essay writing skills with practice, repetition, and perusing books on essay writing, which are full of useful examples.  

While simply living life, observing your surroundings, and diving into classic essays can naturally hone your writing skills, sometimes a trusty guidebook can give you that extra edge. Interested in mastering the craft of essay writing? Dive into some of the best essay-writing manuals out there. If you dream of becoming a professional essay writer , it’s essential to grasp the nuances of structure, tone, and format. Not all gifted writers can craft an exemplary essay, after all. Recognizing the significance of essays, especially in college admissions, can elevate your approach. If you’re gearing up to write a compelling college admission essay , I’d recommend perusing my guide on crafting an outstanding essay .

“I hate writing, I love having written.” – Dorothy Parker

Here are 10 Books That Will Help You With Essay Writing:

1. a professor’s guide to writing essays: the no-nonsense plan for better writing by dr. jacob neumann.

This is the highest-rated book on the subject available on the market right now. It’s written for students at any level of education. The author uses an unorthodox approach, claiming that breaking essays down into different formats is unnecessary. It doesn’t matter if it’s a persuasive or a narrative essay – the difference is not in how you write, but rather in how you build your case . Length: 118 pages Published: 2016

2. College Essay Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Successful College Admissions Essay – by Ethan Sawyer

Every year, millions of high-schoolers scramble to achieve above-average GPAs and score well on the SAT , or in some cases, the ACT , or both. They also have to write a 650-word essay and find their way to their dream college. If you’re one of them, then make sure you read this concise book . Ethan Sawyer (The College Essay Guy), breaks the whole essay-writing process down into simple steps and shows you the way around the most common mistakes college applicants usually make. Length: 256 pages Published: 2016

3. The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need: A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment by Susan Thurman

The institution of a grammar school is defunct, but it doesn’t mean you can ignore the basic rules that govern your language. If you’re writing an essay or a college paper , you better keep your grammar tight. Otherwise, your grades will drop dramatically because professors abhor simple grammar mistakes. By reading this little book , you’ll make sure your writing is pristine. Length: 192 pages Published: 2003

4. Escape Essay Hell!: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Narrative College Application Essays by Janine W. Robinson

A well-written essay has immense power. Not only that, it is the prerequisite to getting admitted to colleges and universities, but you also have to tackle a few essay questions in most, if not all exams you will ever take for career or academic advancement. For instance, when taking the LSAT to qualify for law school , the MCAT to get into med school , the DAT to pursue a degree in dentistry, or even the GRE or GMAT as the first step in earning a master’s degree. That is why this book is highly recommended to anyone navigating through the sea of higher learning. In this amusing book, Janine Robinson focuses mostly on writing narrative essays . She’s been helping college-bound students to tell unique stories for over a decade and you’ll benefit from her expert advice. The book contains 10 easy steps that you can follow as a blueprint for writing the best “slice of life” story ever told. Length: 76 pages Published: 2013

5. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate

This large volume is a necessary diversion from the subject of formal, highly constrained types of writing. It focuses only on the genre of the personal essay which is much more free-spirited, creative, and tongue-and-cheek-like. Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, gathers seventy of the best essays of this type and lets you draw timeless lessons from them. Length: 777 pages Published: 1995

6. The Best American Essays of the Century by Joyce Carol Oates

The art of the modern essay starts with Voltaire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Since then, many a writer attempted to share their personal stories and philosophical musings in this free-flowing form. Americans are no different. In this anthology, Joyce Carol Oates shares some fantastic reads that you need to absorb if you want to become a highly skilled polemicist. Length: 624 pages Published: 2001

7. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

On Writing Well is a classic writing guide that will open your eyes to the art of producing clear-cut copy. Zinsser approached the subject of writing with a warm, cheerful attitude that seeps through the pages of his masterpiece. Whether you want to describe places, communicate with editors, self-edit your copy, or avoid verbosity, this book will have the right answer for you. Length: 336 pages Published: 2016 (reprint edition)

8. How To Write Any High School Essay: The Essential Guide by Jesse Liebman

The previous titles I mentioned were mostly for “grown-up” writers, but the list wouldn’t be complete without a book for ambitious high-school students. Its length is appropriate, making it possible even for the most ADHD among us to get through it. It contains expert advice, easy-to-implement essay outlines , and tips on finding the best topics and supporting them with strong arguments. Length: 124 pages Published: 2017

9. Essential Writing Skills for College and Beyond by C.M. Gill

On average, after finishing high school or college, Americans read only around twelve books per year. This is a pity because books contain a wealth of information. People at the top of the socio-economic ladder read between forty and sixty books per year – and you should too! But reading is just one skill that gets neglected after college. Writing is the other one. By reading the “Essential Writing Skills” you’ll be able to crush all of your college writing assignments and use them throughout your life to sharpen your prose. Length: 250 Published: 2014

10. The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing by Margot Livesey

If you want to write, you first need to read some of the best essays ever written . Developing your style results from conversing with great minds and then borrowing from them to create something new. All great artists are inspired by someone. In Hidden Machinery, Margot Livesey shares her essays on what makes good fiction and a strong narrative. It’s a must-read for all aspiring writers. Length: 224 Published: 2017 How did you like this article? Are you going to read any of the books listed above? Can you recommend any other book that I should add to this list?

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

Adam gopnik on his favourite essay collections.

In Mid-Air: Points of View from over a Decade by Adam Gopnik

What makes a great essayist? Who had it, who didn’t? And whose work left the biggest mark on the New Yorker ? Longtime writer for the magazine, Adam Gopnik , picks out five masters of the craft

And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White

A Sad Heart At The Supermarket by Randall Jarrell

Visions Before Midnight by Clive James

1 And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

2 the common reader by virginia woolf, 3 essays of e.b. white by e.b. white, 4 a sad heart at the supermarket by randall jarrell, 5 visions before midnight by clive james.

B efore we get into the books, I wanted to ask you about essays generally. In your introduction to The Best American Essays of 2008 you have a rather nice phrase: “The essay is a classical form for short-winded Romantics.” What do you mean by that?

There are certain kinds of criticism that I think of as essentially essays – Clive James or Randall Jarrell’s criticism, for instance – whereas there are other critics whom I admire just as much – say [William] Empson and [WH] Auden – but whom I don’t think of as essayists. They’re superior literary critics.

Is the distinction to do with the presence of the “I” in their work?

The “I” need not appear in the piece, but it’s always implicit in the essay. Empson and Auden want to win you round to their point of view, Jarrell and James want to make their experience persuasive. Of course, one of the best ways of winning you round to a point of view is to make your experience persuasive, and one of the best ways to make your experience persuasive is to win you round to a point of view!

There are no absolute lines in this. But there does seem to me a real difference between the things Empson – who is an absolutely wonderful writer and an amazing companion – is trying to do in his critical articles and the things Jarrell is trying to do in his. Jarrell conceives of criticism poetically. That is, that it should have some of the surprise and delight of personal revelation: “ I felt this then, and I passed through the prism of a work of writing” rather than “this is a general truth of literature”.

With essayists, we feel we’re reading their first names rather than their honorifics. We’re reading Clive and Virginia and Randall rather than James and Woolf and Jarrell, in a way we never feel we’re reading William and Wystan rather than Empson and Auden.

You have written that the essay has an implicit politics to it, and that the job of the essay is “to drain the melodrama from overwrought debate and replace it with common sense and comedy”.

Did I say that? When you think [of essays] historically, beginning with Montaigne, one of the things Montaigne does – at a time of violent and feverish religious debate – is he makes the case for both and at once, for either and or, for the division within oneself. That there is no pure or certain state which we can be in in our mental lives.

Even someone as seemingly non-political as Max Beerbohm is placed at the intersection of all kinds of political passions – Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw’s socialism, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism and so on – and he makes fun of them all. That’s one of the things that makes Beerbohm attractive. In a very decorous and mischievous way, he mocks that kind of ideological passion.

You mentioned Beerbohm. Let’s begin with his book And Even Now . You said his approach was to parody and make light of things. He was also a caricaturist. Do you see a link between his illustrations and his essays?

Yes, absolutely. He was a caricaturist with remarkable insight and relatively little malice in his parodies and cartoons. He found the pomposities of over-zealous ideology absurd. He also had a lovely vein of affection. One of my favourite of his picture-books is called Rossetti and H is Circle . It’s basically imaginary pictures of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very complicated domestic life. The implicit theme of the whole book is that behind the Pre-Raphaelite dream of the perfect Botticelli nymph and the medieval romantic life is this very funny, furtive domestic life in Chelsea [London]. Constantly referring dream-life back to reality is another way Beerbohm works.

He’s an essayist who isn’t so widely read these days. Why do you think that is?

For me, Beerbohm has an almost dangerously perfect tone – a mixture of benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority that I think is the tone every essayist searches for. It’s not accidental that Beerbohm was influential on the first generation of The New Yorker writers, people like Wolcott Gibbs.

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One of the dangers of that tone, though, is that it can seem unduly complacent or self-satisfied. I suspect that the note of complacency in Beerbohm’s writing is kind of out of kilter with the times. It’s a note that was so hugely popular for 50 or 60 years that I guess it came to seem old-fashioned. If you ever read old collections of light editorials from The  London Times , they all strive for the Beerbohm sound. Inevitably, when a sound gets imitated for too long it becomes a little empty.

Beerbohm is also not a writer of fanatic passion or political certainty. You can’t consult him directly for the quote you might need about the topic of the day. For those reasons, he’s gone a bit out of fashion. But he remains a wonderful writer, and for me the best witness of that period – the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the modern age.

What do you think he writes best about?

Literature. My favourite of his essays are ones like “A Clergyman”, which is a very close, loving analysis of an obscure passage of [James] Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson . A clergyman, identified in no other way, squeaks out a little objection to something Dr Johnson has said, and Johnson crushes him with his rejoinder. Beerbohm reflects on the lost and hidden life of this clergyman, who made one brief bid for literary immortality and whose name even Boswell couldn’t recall.

Let’s go on to another English essayist, Virginia Woolf . She wrote a great deal of non-fiction. Why does her writing in The Common Reader qualify as essays rather than what they strictly appear to be – reviews or criticism?

Exactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable.

Is it, along with Beerbohm, a particularly English tone? The next three essayists we’re going to talk about are American or Australian.

I think that’s true. There’s a sense in which both Woolf and Beerbohm come after the age of Victorian literary industry. They both take for granted this common pool of Dickens , [George] Eliot and Trollope – writers of huge industry, enormous achievement and vast social observation – and they both make a quiet case for the miniature, for the perfectly wrought. So there’s a kind of running commentary on Victorian fiction in both of their work.

I also think, without having illusions about the nature of the societies in which they worked, that there is a strong lure of a stable and secure literary society in their work. They both feel themselves to be at home with literature, not out of place in any way. Their tone – unlike certain American essayists – does not give a sense of having an uncertain or anxious relationship to literature.

That sense is certainly something you get from the title essay of Jarrell’s collection.

Next, you have gone with a collection of EB White ’s essays. He is one of the most iconic New Yorker writers.

White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and Beerbohm suddenly look stuffy and literary. White has an amazing ability, which I still marvel at, to come very close to a faux-naïve simplicity that’s excessive and then pull it back.

I’m just picking up one of his collections. I’m going to open it up at random and look for a sentence that captures White. Here’s one from a piece called “The Trailer Park”:

“Before sitting down to draft a preamble to the constitution of a world federations of democracies uniting free people under one banner, I decided I would mosey over to the trailer park at the edge of town and ask some of the campers whether they favoured any such idea of this union.”

The virtue of White’s kind of writing is to start with something that sounds pompous and editorial and then use a verb like “mosey over” to make it work. He cleans up the prose of the essay. Both Beerbohm and Woolf are belle-lettrist sort of writers and they connect to that leisurely tradition. White is a much more urbane and American writer.

What is the key “if you haven’t read any White, read this essay” essay for you?

Next up is A Sad Heart At The Supermarket . Randall Jarrell is best known as a poet, rather than an essayist. Why are his essays worth reading?

Jarrell, for me, is the absolute master of what I like to think of as “cabaret criticism”. The man has endless wit. I think his novel Pictures From an Institution is the single wittiest book of the last century, even though I’ve read it 10 times and can never recall the story! He’s a very poor storyteller but an amazingly witty writer.

Jarrell is a comedian of a kind. He always finds something not just witty in a literary way but outright funny to say about extremely serious subjects – about Auden, [Robert] Graves, Laura Riding or Wallace Stevens. I admire that ability to turn straight, old-fashioned literary criticism into a constant performance in the best sense – into a form of entertainment in itself. He supplied a new tone of enormous, wonderful excitability. That’s one of the things I love about Jarrell, and one of the things I struggle to infuse my own work with – a sense of excitement and pleasure even in the driest texts. Most of all he’s just a wonderful joker.

Do you have any favourite lines of his?

Again, let me open the book and take a sentence at random. Here’s one. He’s writing about [Walt] Whitman:

“The interesting thing about Whitman’s worst language (for, just as few poets have ever written better, few poets have written worse) is how unusually absurd, how really ingeniously bad, such language is.”

It’s that tone of hyperbolic excitability in the presence of literature, which is a constant antidote to the solemnity and false seriousness of most literary study.

You mention that Jarrell is a model you seek to emulate. But in terms of taste, at least, you’re a very different kind of writer. In the title essay of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket Jarrell is very wary of popular culture, whereas in last week’s New Yorker you compare the Book of Revelations to Transformers. Love of popular culture runs through your work.

That’s very true. I think all the interesting writers of my generation drew the high brow-low brow line in a very different way to Jarrell’s generation. We all came of age – I’m thinking of Louis Menand or Martin Amis or Clive James – when there seemed to be more genuine artistic energy in popular culture, movies and rock music in particular, than there was in high culture. The experience of The Beatles or Fellini or the Godfather films illuminated our understanding of high culture, rather than the other way around. I think that is a true fault line in the history of modern writing – you’re either on one side of it or the other.

Do you think for Jarrell and his contemporaries it was a lack of genuinely great pop culture in their time that put them off? Or was it a generational thing where they couldn’t get on board with the idea that pop culture, even if very good, is something you can consider seriously alongside high culture?

A little of both. Jarrell writes wonderfully about race cars and American football . He was no snob. But as far as I remember he never references jazz – which is a kind of in-between form of pop culture, more culture than pop in lots of ways. You have to remember too that for Jarrell’s generation, the GI generation, they were in the process of recognising and discovering what we now think of as high culture.

My own father was one of that generation. For him, each piece of high culture he achieved, understood, enjoyed – whether it was Bach or Milton – was part of a mountain climbed. We all, in a sense, started too easily – somewhere up on the mountain – because of their work, and therefore had a different view of it.

Do you have a favourite Jarrell essay?

Your last choice is Visions Before Midnight by Clive James. How did you come across his work? He’s well known in Britain, especially for his TV career, but not so much in America.

In 1980, Knopf did an anthology of his essays called First Reactions . In a curious way it was an advantage to read him flat-out as a writer. All of my friends in England read him as an entanglement of personal presence and prose style. I read him simply as prose style, without any knowledge of what his personal presence was like.

What was it you liked about his writing?

He has some of Jarrell’s excitability in the presence of creative energy. He has the ability to bring you into his writing, even when he’s writing about things that are in some ways utterly trivial and often completely forgotten, like British TV of the 1970s. He has a way of turning each of those subjects into a wonderful essay – an exercise in cabaret criticism – about values.

Values, I think, are his real subject. The overriding lesson of his work is that categories – high art, low art, television, theatre – are misleading guides to value. That even runs at a deeper, moral level in James’s work about the larger categories – provincial and metropolitan, for instance. He’s a provincial guy who comes to the city, but his provincial experience is in lots of ways richer than his metropolitan experience. It’s the rejection of categories in place of values that is the Montaigne-like takeaway in all his work.

Did he have an influence on your writing, or were you far enough in your writing career to find him as a friend and ally rather than a mentor figure?

Whereas Jarrell, Beerbohm and White were in different ways direct elements in the long-simmering braise that produced my prose style, for whatever it’s worth, Clive came along when I was already, in some sense, a formed writer.

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But I did learn one very specific thing from his writing. He’s a very linear writer. His essays are always organised around sharp, direct and forward-pushing sentences. Whereas with Virginia Woolf your first response to one of her paragraphs, in the best way, is to read it again. Your first response to a Clive James piece is to keep on reading. I learned a great deal about how to make a piece propulsive from reading him.

And can you pick a favourite Clive James essay?

As with Woolf, the joy is cumulative – it’s the pleasure of reading all of his work. But here’s a good one. It’s a television column from December 3rd 1972 which goes from an argument between the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, to a documentary on “Bomber” Harris and the morality of area bombing, to a production of Oedipus Rex , to a new David Mercer play. In the midst of it, this comes up:

“Why, then, with all this talent [in the production of Oedipus], including a sumptuous lighting design that covers the décor with spiced gloom, does the production have so little sting? The answer, I think, is that there’s not much point in trying to supply a binding image to a play whose author was so intent on leaving imagery out. It’s difficult to think of Sophocles looking with favour on any attempt to pin his universalised theme to mere political instability.”

That’s a deep and original thought, perfectly expressed, which rises out of the normal eddies of TV journalism. That combination of range, ease and aphoristic subtlety is what I love in Clive’s work.

March 7, 2012

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College Essay Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Successful College Admissions Essay Paperback – July 1, 2016

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The #1 resource for writing an amazing college essay to help get into your dream school!

Unlock the key to college admission success with College Essay Essentials , a comprehensive and invaluable resource designed to empower students in their essay-writing journey. Packed with expert guidance and practical tips, this must-have book is tailored specifically for high school seniors, transfer students, and aspiring college applicants.

In College Essay Essentials , Ethan Sawyer, a renowned college essay advisor and expert, shares his proven strategies and insider knowledge to help you navigate the daunting task of crafting compelling essays that stand out from the competition. With an unwavering focus on authenticity, creativity, and effective storytelling, Sawyer empowers you to create impactful narratives that captivate admissions officers.

Writing a college admission essay doesn't have to be stressful. Sawyer (aka The College Essay Guy) will show you that there are only four (really, four!) types of college admission essays. And all you have to do to figure out which type is best for you is answer two simple questions:

1. Have you experienced significant challenges in your life?

2. Do you know what you want to be or do in the future?

With these questions providing the building blocks for your essay, Sawyer guides you through the rest of the process, from choosing a structure to revising your essay, and answers the big questions that have probably been keeping you up at night: How do I brag in a way that doesn't sound like bragging? and How do I make my essay, like, deep?

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• Print length 256 pages
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A graduate of Northwestern University, Ethan holds an MFA from UC Irvine and two counseling certificates. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife and their amazing daughter.

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Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in April

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

T he best books coming in April include historian Erik Larson ’s latest nonfiction thriller, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey ’s meditation on writing, and Salman Rushdie ’s agonizing account of the brutal knife attack he suffered two years ago. Other notable releases include a pair of career-spanning anthologies that celebrate the works of cultural critic Maggie Nelson and historian Nell Irvin Painter , as well as Amor Towles ’ first collection of short stories. Alyssa Cole ’s new mystery features a protagonist struggling with dissociative identity disorder, while former therapist Patric Gagne hopes to recontextualize the term “sociopath” with her debut memoir of the same name. 

Here, the 12 best books to read this month.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories , Julia Alvarez (April 2)

In Julia Alvarez ’s seventh adult novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, acclaimed writer Alma Cruz inherits a piece of her homeland, the Dominican Republic. After the death of her close friend and fellow author, Alma decides to retire and turn her plot of land into a graveyard for the unpublished tales she’d like to finally put to rest. But just because Alma is ready to abandon her characters, some of whom are based on real historical figures, it doesn’t mean they are ready to go peacefully. Mystical and moving, The Cemetery of Untold Stories shows why some stories must be told no matter how hard you try to bury them.

Buy Now : The Cemetery of Untold Stories on Bookshop | Amazon

Village Weavers , Myriam J. A. Chancy (April 2)

For fans of Elena Ferrante : Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is a wistful look at a complicated female friendship that spans decades and continents. Growing up in1940s Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Gertie and Sisi are the best of friends until a devastating secret that bonds their families tears them apart. The book follows the two women as they fall in and out of one another’s lives amid a violent dictatorship, and struggle with infertility and terminal illness. When Sisi gets an unexpected call from Gertie in 2002, decades after they last spoke, she must decide whether she is ready to forgive—or forget—all that they have shared.

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Sociopath , Patric Gagne (April 2)

Writer and former therapist Patric Gagne first discovered she was a sociopath in college. But, in her provocative debut memoir, Sociopath , she admits that there were signs long before she was diagnosed. With incredible candor, she details the violent outbursts she exhibited as a child that would lead to near run-ins with the law in her teens and 20s. “Most of the time I felt nothing,” she writes, “so I did bad things to make the nothingness go away.” Despite her lifelong lack of empathy, shame, and guilt, she has become a loving wife and mother, something she knows doesn’t fit with pop culture’s portrayal of sociopaths as murderers, villains, and monsters. In her memoir, Gagne looks to destigmatize the often misunderstood mental disorder, now more commonly known as antisocial personality disorder , while offering compassion to those, like her, who are trying to change what it means to be a sociopath.

Buy Now : Sociopath on Bookshop | Amazon

We Loved It All , Lydia Millet (April 2)

Lydia Millet ’s first foray into nonfiction, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, questions what humans lose when they ignore their connection to the animal kingdom. With great passion and indignation, the acclaimed novelist behind 2022’s Dinosaurs takes aim at corporations whose greed has endangered the world’s wildlife. She looks at how the “ Crying Indian” anti-litter campaign from the 1970s allowed big business to place the onus on consumers to clean up the environmental mess they played the largest role in causing. By sharing personal anecdotes about her own childhood, as well as the experiences of raising her son and daughter, Millet shows how caring about the smallest creatures that live among us is tied to the fight for economic justice around the globe. With her mournful yet often hopeful rumination on our current state of existence, Millet reminds us that we are not alone in this world.

Buy Now : We Loved It All on Bookshop | Amazon

Like Love , Maggie Nelson (April 2)

Like Love draws on two decades of Maggie Nelson’s career as a critic of art in all its forms. The collection of previously published work, arranged in chronological order, includes essays on, tributes to, and conversations with creatives the author deeply admires: musician Björk, poet Eileen Myles, fine artist Kara Walker , the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , novelist Ben Lerner , philosopher Judith Butler , and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, whose words inspired the book’s title. When examining the art she loves, Nelson uses incisive and analytical prose, but her scholarly style doesn’t take away from the joy she feels for the work. “Words aren’t just what’s left,” she writes of why we need criticism. “They’re what we have to offer.”

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Table for Two , Amor Towles (April 2)

Amor Towles ’ Table For Two is an intimate collection of six short stories that take place in early 2000s New York, and a 1930s Hollywood-set novella that picks up where his 2011 debut, Rules of Civility , left off. The book, which was written while he was meant to be working on his fourth novel , focuses on brief but fateful encounters between strangers, would-be business partners, and estranged relatives. Most of these conversations take place at a table set for two, the perfect place to share a tête-à-tête about forgery or bootlegging or even the blackmailing of screen legend Olivia de Havilland . Table For Two is a smorgasbord of deliciously mischievous tales imbued with Towles’ signature wit and worldliness.

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The House of Being , Natasha Trethewey (April 9)

In The House of Being, which was originally delivered as a 2022 prize lecture at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey takes readers back to her grandmother’s home outside of Gulfport, Miss., where the author learned to read and write. It was there that her neighbors flew Confederate flags with pride, and her late mother—whose death at the hands of her ex-husband was the focus of Trethewey’s best-selling 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive — took to singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” any time she passed one. It was also where, Trethewey would later learn, formerly enslaved men and women were educated after the Civil War, their stories lost to time because they had not been written down. With The House of Being, Trethewey doesn’t just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories.

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One of Us Knows , Alyssa Cole (April 16)

Best-selling author Alyssa Cole ’s latest novel, One of Us Knows, is a paranoia-filled murder mystery full of twists and turns. Preservationist Kenetria “Ken” Nash has taken a job as the caretaker of a gothic castle on a remote island on the Hudson River in the hopes of getting back on her feet. For the last six years, Ken has struggled with dissociative identity disorder, which causes her to, without much warning, “switch” between multiple identities. Lately, Ken has found it harder to keep her “headmates”—precocious toddler Keke, judgy perfectionist Della, and the sophisticated Solomon, to name a few—in check. When a man from Ken’s past is found dead in the historic home, she must enlist her headmates’ help in hopes of clearing her name, all the while knowing she could be the killer she is looking for.

Buy Now : One of Us Knows on Bookshop | Amazon

Knife , Salman Rushdie (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly 10 times while at a speaking engagement in western New York. With his new memoir, Knife, Rushdie writes about the violent attack that left him with PTSD , limited mobility in his left hand, and the loss of sight in his right eye, offering an intimate and often harrowing account of what happened that day and what life has been like for him since. (The trial for Rushdie’s alleged attacker , who has been charged with attempted murder, has been postponed due to the release of this book, since it can serve as potential evidence.) Rushdie has said that writing Knife was an important step in the healing process. “This was a necessary book for me to write,” he said in a statement . “A way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”

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I Just Keep Talking , Nell Irvin Painter (April 23)

For the past five decades, acclaimed writer, artist, historian, and critic Nell Irvin Painter’s work has felt ahead of its time. I Just Keep Talking, a decades-spanning collection of more than 40 of her previously published essays, shows just how prescient her work really was. The anthology includes a 1982 essay on the effect white educators’ reluctance to teach Black resistance would have on how the history of slavery is taught in America . In other pieces, she examines how Spike Lee ’s film Malcolm X reinvented the activist and breaks down the gender and racial stereotypes that hurt Anita Hill ’s case against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. A more recent essay from 2022 offers a strong warning to Democrats: If you “jettison voting rights in order to court white voters without college degrees,” she writes, you’ll risk repeating the mistakes of Reconstruction . This insightful anthology shows why Painter, now 81 years old, is still one of the most important voices in America.

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Lucky , Jane Smiley (April 23)

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The Demon of Unrest , Erik Larson (April 30)

After tackling World War II by focusing on Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz with The Splendid and the Vile , one of TIME’s best books of 2020 , Erik Larson returns with a historical nonfiction thriller set before the start of the U.S. Civil War . The Demon of Unrest looks at the chaotic five-month period between the November 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln and the April 1861 surrender of Fort Sumter , which marked the official beginning of the war. Using journals, slave ledgers, plantation records, and secret correspondence, Larson offers an intriguing look at a young country on the brink of collapse. He reexamines the lead-up to the four-year conflict by putting the focus not only on the rebellion’s major players, but also on those on the periphery: Maj. Robert Anderson, the Union commander at Fort Sumter, Edmund Ruffin, an agricultural reformer and ardent secessionist, James H. Hammond, a senator and wealthy plantation owner from South Carolina, and Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wealthy wife of a lawyer and senator whose diary became an invaluable resource for the author.

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Donald Trump and Megan Mullally performing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmy Awards, Los Angeles, September 2005

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In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand.

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Hard as it is to understand, especially for those of us who are too terrified to be amused, Trump’s ranting is organized laughter. To understand his continuing hold over his fans, we have to ask: Why is he funny?

This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is “only a joke.” Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that “only a joke” can so easily become “no joke”—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.

This shift has happened in Europe, too. Think of Boris Johnson’s clown act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes, and ludicrous language. Or think of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons ( meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger. It is impossible to think of previous far-right leaders engaging in such public self-mockery. Only in our time is it possible for a politician to create a sense of cultlike authority by using the collusiveness of comedy, the idea that the leader and his followers are united by being in on the joke.

Trump may be a narcissist, but he has a long history of this kind of self-caricature. When he did the Top Ten List on the David Letterman show in 2009, he seemed entirely comfortable delivering with a knowing smirk the top ten “financial tips” written for him, including “When nobody’s watching I go into a 7/11 and stick my head under a soda nozzle”; “Save money by styling your own hair” (pointing to his own improbable coiffure); “Sell North Dakota to the Chinese”; “If all else fails, steal someone’s identity”; and “The fastest way to get rich: marry and divorce me.” This performance, moreover, was the occasion for Trump’s entry into the world of social media. His first ever tweet was: “Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, Trump dressed in blue overalls and a straw hat and, brandishing a pitchfork, sang the theme song from the 1960s TV comedy Green Acres . Trump is a terrible singer and a worse actor, but he seemed completely unembarrassed on stage. He understood the joke: that Oliver, the fictional character he was impersonating, is a wealthy Manhattanite who moves to rustic Hooterville to run a farm, following his dream of the simple life—an alternative self that was amusing because it was, for Trump, unimaginable. But he may have sensed that there was also a deep cultural resonance. The Apprentice was “reality TV ,” a form in which the actual and the fictional are completely fused.

Green Acres , scenes from which played on a screen behind Trump as he was singing, pioneered this kind of metatelevision. Its debut episode set it up as a supposed documentary presented by a well-known former newscaster. Its characters regularly broke the fourth wall. When Oliver launched into rhapsodic speeches about American rural values, a fife rendition of “Yankee Doodle” would play on the soundtrack, and the other characters would move around in puzzlement trying to figure out where the musician was. Eva Gabor, playing Oliver’s pampered wife, admits on the show that her only real talent is doing impressions of Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actor’s more famous real-life sister.

The critic Armond White wrote in 1985 that “ Green Acres ’ surreal rationale is to capture the moment American gothic turns American comic.” Trump playing Oliver in 2005 may be the moment American comedy turned gothic again. Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice . And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image—it was his image. This connection to Green Acres was reestablished by Trump himself as president of the United States. In December 2018, as he was about to sign the Farm Bill into law, Trump tweeted, “Farm Bill signing in 15 minutes! #Emmys #TBT,” with a clip of himself in the Green Acres spoof. Hooterville and the White House were as one.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior. The prototype dictators of the far right may have looked absurd to their critics (“Hitler,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, “can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a provincial tenor”), but within the community of their followers and the shadow community of their intended victims, their histrionics had to be taken entirely seriously. Trump, on the other hand, retains all his self-aware absurdity even while creating a political persona of immense consequence.

This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank: in the 2016 presidential campaign even liberal outlets like The New York Times took Hillary Clinton’s e-mails far more seriously than Trump’s open stirring of hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. Funny-autocratic functions better in a society like that of the US, where the boundaries of acceptable insult are still shifting and mainstream hate-mongering still has to be light on its feet. It allows racial insults and brazen lies to be issued, as it were, in inverted commas. If you don’t see those invisible quotation marks, you are not smart enough—or you are too deeply infected by the woke mind virus—to be in on the joke. You are not part of the laughing community. The importance of not being earnest is that it defines the boundaries of the tribe. The earnest are the enemy.

The extreme right in America was very quick to understand the potency of “only a joke” in the Internet age. In a 2001 study of three hate speech websites sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, Michael Billig noted that each of them described itself on its home page as a humorous exercise. The largest, called “N…..jokes KKK ” (the ellipsis is mine) carried the disclaimers: “You agree by entering this site, that this type of joke is legal where you live, and you agree that you recognize this site is meant as a joke not to be taken seriously”; “And you agree that this site is a comedy site, not a real racist site”; “We ARE NOT real life racists.”

What does “real life” even mean when Klansmen are not really racist? The power of this “humorous” mode of discourse lies at least partly in the way it blurs the distinctions between the real and the symbolic, and between words and actions. Consider the example of some of the men tried for their alleged parts in a 2020 plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. One of them, Barry Croft, insisted at his trial in 2022 that he was joking most of the time when he posted on Facebook questions like “Which governor is going to end up being dragged off and hung for treason first?” Another, Brandon Caserta, was acquitted in 2022 in part because he successfully pleaded that violent statements he made on Facebook and in secretly recorded meetings of the group were not serious. These included claims that the Second Amendment sanctions the killing of “agents of the government when they become tyrannical.” “I may kill dozens of agents but eventually die in the process,” Caserta wrote on Facebook in May 2020. He later posted that he would beat government agents so hard they would “beg til they couldn’t beg any more because their mouth is so full of blood.”

At Croft’s trial, his defense attorney put it to an FBI witness that a meme Croft posted showing thirty bullets as “30 votes that count” was “A little tongue-in-cheek? A little bit funny?” On the second season of Jon Ronson’s superb podcast series for the BBC , Things Fell Apart , Caserta acknowledges that, on the secret recordings, he is heard to urge his fellow militia members that any lawyers advocating for the Covid vaccine be decapitated in their own homes, speaks of “wanting Zionist banker blood,” and advocates blowing up buildings where the vaccine is manufactured. He nonetheless insists to Ronson:

This isn’t something I’m dead serious about. This is nothing I ever planned. It’s funny, dude! It’s funny! It’s fun to blow stuff up. It’s fun to shoot guns. It’s fun to say ridiculous offensive shit. And if it offends you, so what? I don’t care about your feelings and how you feel about words. Sorry!

The twist of logic here is striking: Caserta equates blowing stuff up and shooting people with saying ridiculous offensive shit. Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (“fight like hell”) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently “no joke” to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently “only a joke” to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.

For those who love Trump, there is something carnivalesque in all of this. In his discussion of “mediaeval laughter” in Rabelais and His World , Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “one might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” Bakhtin suggested that the

festive liberation of laughter…was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.

Trump and many of his followers have made this quite literal. They create their own America, their own republic, their own notions of legality, their own church of the leader’s cult, their own state versus what they see as the official state. In this way, extreme polarization becomes a sphere of utopian freedom.

This is the capacious zone in which Trump’s comedy operates, an arena that admits everyone who gets the joke, from those who fantasize about killing tyrants, decapitating lawyers, and torturing government agents to those who just like to blow off steam by listening to their hero saying stuff that riles the woke enemy. It is crucial that in Trump’s delivery there is no shift from mockery to seriousness, no line between entertainment and violence. His singsong tone is generous and flexible, serving equally well for vaudeville and vituperation. In his streams of consciousness, they flow together as complementary currents.

In the recent speeches in which he has upped the ante on openly fascist rhetoric by characterizing his opponents as “vermin” and accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is notable that his cadence is soft, almost lilting. There is no warning to his audience that these comments are of a different order. They are not even applause lines. By underplaying them, Trump leaves open the fundamental question: Is his mimicking of Hitler’s imagery just another impersonation, all of a piece with the way he does Biden and Haley in funny voices or even with the way he sings the theme song from Green Acres ?

Even when Trump actually goes the whole way and acknowledges that his rhetoric is indeed Hitlerian, as he did in a speech in Iowa after the alarmed reaction of liberals to his previous “poisoning the blood” speech, it is in a passage that jumbles together murderous intent, complaint about the media, and comic acting: “They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing…. They don’t like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf .” But he makes the “Kampf” funny, puckering his lips and elongating the “pf” so it sounds like a rude noise. He continues: “They said ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’” Then he adds his defense: “in a much different way.” It is the stand-up comedian’s credo: it’s not the jokes, it’s the way you tell ’em. And this is, indeed, true—the difference is in the way he tells it, in a voice whose ambiguous pitch has been perfected over many years of performance.

The knowingness is all. In the speech in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, in which he openly encouraged Russia to attack “delinquent” members of NATO , this startling statement, with potential world-historical consequences, was preceded by Trump’s metatheatrical riff on the idea of “fun.” What was fun, he told his followers, was the reaction he could provoke just by saying “Barack Hussein Obama”:

Every time I say it, anytime I want to have a little fun…even though the country is going to hell, we have to have a little bit of fun…. Remember Rush Limbaugh, he’d go “Barack Hooosaynn Obama”—I wonder what he was getting at.

He then segued into another commentary on his own well-honed send-up of Joe Biden: “I do the imitation where Biden can’t find his way off the stage…. So I do the imitation—is this fun?—I say this guy can’t put two sentences together…and then I go ‘Watch!’” (He said the word with a comic pout.) “I’ll imitate him. I go like this: ‘Haw!’” Trump hunches his shoulders and extends his arm, in a parody of Biden’s gestures. In this burlesque, Trump is not just mimicking his opponent; he is explicitly reenacting his own previous mocking impersonation, complete with commentary. He is simultaneously speaking, acting, and speaking about his acting.

It is within this “fun” frame that Trump proceeded to insinuate that there is something awry with Nikki Haley’s marriage: “Where’s her husband? Oh he’s away…. What happened to her husband? What happened to her husband! Where is he? He’s gone. He knew, he knew.” He and presumably many members of the audience were aware that Michael Haley is currently serving in Djibouti with the South Carolina National Guard. But as part of the show, with the funny voices and the exaggerated gestures, that lurid hint at some mysteriously unmentionable scandal (“He knew, he knew”) is somehow amusing. And then so is Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of a “big” NATO country that the US would not defend it from invasion and—the punch line—that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.” Here Trump is acting in both senses, both ostentatiously performing and exerting a real influence on global politics—but which is which? How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

This shuffling in a typical Trump speech of different levels of seriousness—personal grudges beside grave geopolitics, savage venom mixed with knockabout farce, possible truths rubbing up against outrageous lies—creates a force field of incongruities. Between the looming solidity of Trump’s body and the airy, distracted quality of his words, in which weightless notions fly off before they are fully expressed, he seems at once immovable and in manic flux.

Incongruity has long been seen as one of the conditions of comedy. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections Upon Laughter (1725) noted that it is “this contrast or opposition of ideas of dignity and meanness which is the occasion of laughter.” The supposedly dignified idea of “greatness” is vital to Trump’s presence and rhetoric. But it is inextricably intertwined with the mean, the inconsequential, even the infantile. He is at one moment the grandiose man of destiny and the next a naughty child—an incongruity that can be contained only within an organized laughter in which the juxtaposition of incompatibilities is the essence of fun. This is why Trump’s lapses into pure gibberish—like telling a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 that the Democrats are planning to “change the name of Pennsylvania” and that, in relation to the marble columns in the hall, it was “incredible how they could [have been built] years ago without the powerful tractors that you have today”—do not make his fans alarmed about his mental acuity. Cognitive dysfunction is not a worry with a man whose métier is cognitive dissonance.

Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1986 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

March 21, 2024

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20 Must-Read Best Essay Collections of 2019

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

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Calling all essay fans! For your reading pleasure, I’ve rounded up the best essay collections of 2019. It was a fabulous year for essays (although I say that about most years, to be honest). We’ve had some stellar anthologies of writing about disability, feminism, and the immigrant experience. We’ve had important collections about race, mental health, the environment, and media. And we’ve had collections of personal essays to entertain us and make us feel less alone. There should be something in this list for just about any reading mood or interest.

These books span the entire year, and in cases where the book isn’t published yet, I’ve given you the publication date so you can preorder it or add it to your library list.

I hope this list of the best essay collections of 2019 helps you find new books you love!

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times , edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

This book emerged from a  New York Times series of personal essays on living with a disability. Each piece was written by a person in the disabled community, and the volume contains an introduction by Andrew Solomon. The topics cover romance, shame, ambition, childbearing, parenting, aging, and much more. The authors offer a wide range of perspectives on living in a world not built for them.

Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard’s essays are about her experiences of race. She writes about life as a black woman in Vermont, her family’s history in Alabama and Nashville, her job as a professor who teaches African American literature, and her adoption of twin girls from Ethiopia. It begins with the story of a stabbing in New Haven and uses that as a springboard to write about what it means to live in a black body.

Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger , edited by Lilly Dancyger (Seal Press, October 8)

Women’s anger has been the source of some important and powerful writing lately (see Rebecca Traister’s  Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s  Rage Becomes Her ). This collection brings together a diverse group of writers to further explore the subject. The book’s 22 writers include Leslie Jamison, Melissa Febos, Evette Dionne, and more.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of essays on mental and chronic illness. Wang combines research with her personal knowledge of illness to explore misconceptions about schizophrenia and disagreements in the medical community about definitions and treatments. She tells moving, honest personal stories about living with mental illness.

The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections by Eliane Brum, Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Graywolf, October 15)

This volume collects work from two of Brum’s books, and includes investigative pieces and profiles about Brazil and its people. She focuses on underrepresented communities such as indigenous midwives from the Amazon and people in the favelas of São Paulo. Her book captures the lives and voices of people not often written about.

Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams (Sarah Crichton Books, October 8)

This volume collects essays written between 2016 and 2018 covering the topic she has always written so beautifully about: the natural world. The essays focus on the concept of erosion, including the erosion of land and of the self. They are her response to the often-overwhelming challenges we face in the political and the natural world.

The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America ,  edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman

This volume brings together an amazing group of writers including Chigozie Obioma, Jenny Zhang, Fatimah Asghar, Alexander Chee, and many more. The essayists are first and second generation immigrants who describe their personal experiences and struggles with finding their place in the U.S. The pieces connect first-person stories with broader cultural and political issues to paint an important picture of the U.S. today.

Good Things Happen to People You Hate: Essays by Rebecca Fishbein (William Morrow, October 15)

In the tradition of Samantha Irby and Sloane Crosley, this collection is a humorous look at life’s unfairness. Fishbein writes about trouble with jobs, bedbugs, fires, and cyber bullying. She covers struggles with alcohol, depression, anxiety, and failed relationships. She is honest and hilarious both, wittily capturing experiences shared by many.

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

This book contains new and previously published essays by  New Yorker  critic Emily Nussbaum. The pieces include reviews and profiles. They also argue for a new type of criticism that can accommodate the ambition and complexity of contemporary television. She makes a case for opening art criticism up to new forms and voices.

I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying by Bassey Ikpi

Bassey Ikpi’s essay collection is about her personal experiences dealing with Bipolar II and anxiety. She writes about struggling with mental health even while her career as a spoken word artist was flourishing. She looks at the ways our mental health is intertwined with every aspect of our lives. It’s an honest look at identity, health, and illness.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown and Company, November 5)

These pieces are humorous, whimsical essays about things that are on Jenny Slate’s mind. As she—an actress and stand-up comedian as well as writer—describes it, “I looked into my brain and found a book. Here it is.” With a light touch, she tells us honestly what it’s like to be her and how she sees the world, one little, weird piece of it at a time.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays   by Leslie Jamison

Here is Jamison’s follow-up essay collection to the bestselling   Empathy Exams . This one is divided into three sections, “Longing,” “Looking,” and “Dwelling,” each with pieces that combine memoir and journalism. Her subjects include the Sri Lankan civil war, the online world Second Life, the whale 52 Blue, eloping in Las Vegas, giving birth, and many more.

My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education   by Jennine Capó Crucet

Crucet grew up in Miami, the daughter of Cuban refugees. Here she explores her family’s attempts to fit into American culture and her feeling of being a stranger in her own country. She considers her relationship to the so-called “American Dream” and what it means to live in a place that doesn’t always recognize your right to be there.

Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine

Emilie Pine is an Irish writer, and this book is a bestseller in Ireland. These six personal essays touch on addiction, sexual assault, infertility, and more. She captures women’s experiences that often remain hidden. She writes about bodies and emotions from rage to grief to joy with honesty, clarity, and nuance.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World by Zahra Hankir (Editor) and Christiane Amanpour (Foreword)

This collection gathers together 19 writers discussing their experiences as journalists working in their home countries. These women risk their lives reporting on war and face sexual harassment and difficulties traveling alone, but they also are able to talk to women and get stories their male counterpoints can’t. Their first person accounts offer new perspectives on women’s lives and current events in the Middle East.

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

Picking this up is a fitting way to pay tribute to the great Toni Morrison, who just passed away last summer. This book is a collection of essays, speeches, and meditations from the past four decades. Topics include the role of the artist, African Americans in American literature, the power of language, and discussions of her own work and that of other writers and artists.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and nature writer. These essays combine travel, memoir, and history to look at a world rapidly changing because of our warming climate. She ranges from thawing tundra in Alaska to the preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland and also examines her own experiences with change as her children grow and her father dies.

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

As of this writing,  Thick  was just longlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction. McMillan Cottom’s essays look at culture and personal experience from a sociological perspective. It’s an indispensable collection for those who want to think about race and society, who like a mix of personal and academic writing, and who want some complex, challenging ideas to chew on.

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination   by Jess Row

White Flights is an examination of how race gets written about in American fiction, particularly by white writers creating mostly white spaces in their books. Row looks at writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and more to consider the role that whiteness has played in the American literary imagination.

The Witches Are Coming   by Lindy West (Hachette Books, November 5)

The Witches Are Coming  is Lindy West’s follow-up to her wonderful, best-selling book  Shrill .  She’s back with more of her incisive cultural critiques, writing essays on feminism and the misogyny that is (still) embedded in every part of our culture. She brings humor, wit, and much-needed clarity to the gender dynamics at play in media and culture.

There you have it—the best collections of 2019! This was a great year for essays, but so were the two years before. Check out my round-ups of the best essay collections from 2018 and 2017 .

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Why Pauline Kael’s fight over ‘Citizen Kane’ still matters, whichever side you’re on

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Did Orson Welles get too much glory for “Citizen Kane”? Absolutely, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael insists in this novella-length fire-starter about the making of the greatest movie of all time. (We can save that skirmish for another day.) As Charles Foster Kane, a sendup of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Welles embodied the image of a vainglorious Great Man. But Welles’ success, according to Kael, meant he also needed to be taken down a peg.

The Ultimate Hollywood Bookshelf

“Raising Kane” ranks No. 40 on our list of the best Hollywood books of all time.

“Orson Welles wasn’t around when ‘Citizen Kane’ was written,” Kael chided. The 25-year-old prodigy was busy doing radio plays with the Mercury Theatre and promoting his forthcoming film debut with a studio that wanted only one name — by Orson Welles! — on the posters. RKO’s advertising campaign lauded “Citizen Kane” as the creation of “a one-man band.” Meanwhile, the actual author of the masterpiece — the movie’s co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz — was tucked away in a rest home in Victorville, dictating the script to his secretary.

Kael’s Mankiewicz was a pitiable figure, a self-destructive alcoholic nursing a broken leg and an injured ego. She hoisted him up as one of Hollywood’s unheralded heroes, a brilliant quipster who quietly contributed his wit to everything from “Duck Soup” to “The Wizard of Oz.” Mankiewicz’s work often went unacknowledged, but he’d helped give the 1930s comedies the rat-a-tat rhythm of he and his friends ping-ponging jokes around the Algonquin Round Table. Much of the New York literary clique followed Mankiewicz to California when the industry shifted from silents to sound and filmmakers suddenly needed to hand their beautiful faces brilliant things to say. Together, this band of bohemians molded the modern movie business into what Kael hails as “wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment.”

Decades later, David Fincher’s biopic “Mank” would back up Kael’s sympathetic sketch of Mankiewicz as the forgotten man. But pretty much everyone else considers her essay a hit job, a ferocious attack on a cinematic Goliath. “Raising Kane” took down Welles as handily as if she’d slipped a grenade in her slingshot. After the piece’s publication, Welles’ reputation tumbled — although the height from which he fell was his own fault. “Cinema is the work of one single person,” Kael quotes Welles as boasting, adding that he’d also bragged of making an easy transition from theater to film, as “there was nothing about camerawork that any intelligent man couldn’t learn in half a day.”

Such hubris put Welles in Kael’s crosshairs. (On his slighting of cinematographer Gregg Toland, she snarked, “Welles, like Hearst, and like most very big men, is capable of some very small gestures.”) Yet Kael’s real target was Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris , her longtime rival who had staked his reputation on the auteur theory — the exaltation of the director über alles . To pull off her thesis, she refused to interview anyone who might have disagreed with her, including Welles himself. Anyone reading “Raising Kane” for the first time should remember that it’s merely one side in an intellectual tug-of-war.

Subsequent counter-essays flung darts at Kael’s biased research. (“How the hell do you call out a lady movie critic at dawn?” Welles groaned in a letter quoted in Peter Bogdanovich’s rebuttal, “The Kane Mutiny.”) But “Raising Kane’s” value transcends the question of whether Kael was correct. (She kinda was, she kinda wasn’t.) What matters is she started a fight that forced all film fans to consider, and defend, their definition of a great director: Is it a big boss enforcing their will upon a set, or a humble collaborator who brings out the best in their team?

For the peacemakers, it’s possible to twist “Raising Kane” into a defense of Welles’ later career, often waved off as not living up to the promise of his first film. If the boy genius puffed himself up too much, then it’s a kindness to forgive him for not measuring up to artificially inflated expectations. And despite the outrage, it’s clear that Kael admired “Citizen Kane” and the man who marshaled it into existence. “Orson Welles brought forth a miracle,” she wrote. Bless his heart.

Nicholson is a film critic and the host of the podcast “Unspooled.” Her first book, “Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor” was published by Cahiers du Cinema, and her second, “Extra Girls,” will be published by Simon & Schuster.

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Five of the best books about siblings

Our brothers and sisters can be our best friends, our enemies, and everything in between. These stories explore the unique bonds we have with them

F rom the Marx Brothers to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, siblings have a funny way of stealing the show. In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, brothers and sisters are the “first evidence” and “last confirmation” of love – but in other books, riding solo wins out. “Part of the joy of being a novelist,” writes Cólm Tóibín, in the LRB essay collection, Sisters Come Second, “is to erase all trace of siblinghood”. The US calendar marks 10 April as National Sibling Day, but Europeans who choose to celebrate have a little longer to wait (it’s 31 May ).

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

A brother, for Baldwin’s narrator, Hall Montana, is both a person and a means of comparison. “One’s little brother begins his life,” he reflects, “within the sturdy gates of one’s imagination … he is everything that you are not … Your life can now be written anew on the empty slate of his.” When that once-little brother is found dead “in a pool of blood”, Hall must relearn what his own life means. Blood and bloodlines dominate Baldwin’s musical, painful final novel. Against a sweeping backdrop of Harlem, Africa and Korea, Baldwin’s cast of siblings, friends and lovers tell a story about the families that are given to us, and the ones we create for ourselves.

Siblings by Brigitte Reimann

Set in the 1960s in what was then the German Democratic Republic, this tense, slim autobiographical novel spans three days in the life of Elisabeth, a painter, as she reflects on her relationship with her brother Uli. The narrative flickers between her memories of their childhood, with all its postwar hardship and her agonising realisation that her beloved brother is planning to defect to the west. A brilliant exploration of what happens when “the myth of sibling love” collides with political ideals, rendered in a sparkling new translation by Lucy Jones.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

A cult 60s coming-of-age tale, Cassandra at the Wedding feels very much of its time. Shades of the phoney-hating Holden Caulfield hover around our cool-eyed narrator, as she heads home to “hook-and-zip” her twin sister into her wedding gown, and “take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger”. Cassandra’s penchant for brandy, uppers and angst make for increasingly untethered behaviour, and the novel unfurls like a bacchanalian comedy of errors, with plenty of poolside action.

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Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing

Rausing’s account of her brother Hans’s and sister-in-law Eva’s struggles with drug addiction is, in many ways, an ordinary story. The “individuality of addicts”, Rausing writes “is curiously erased by the predictable progress of the disease”. But in this case, the Rausing family’s Tetra Pak fortune , and the grim circumstances around her sister-in-law’s death, created something more seemingly sensational, and her family’s life swiftly became the stuff of tabloid headlines. This is a thoughtful and compelling memoir about guilt, boundaries and the fictions of memory – “the stories that hold a family together, and the acts that can split it apart”.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

A girl begs the authorities to be allowed to bring her twin brother’s body home. The state resists. The story of Antigone is reshaped here for the 21st century, and on a global stage. This time the actors are not warring factions in Thebes but a young man drawn into Islamic State, his family in the UK, and the press that shapes and moulds their stories. With moving characterisation and elegant prose, Shamsie paints a tragedy of faith, loyalty and family on a grand canvas, but stays true to her all-too human characters.

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Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

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By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

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